Connoisseur of all things pop culture

2015 Oscar Nominations

Everything is NOT awesome.

The nominations for the 87th Academy Awards were made this morning. It’s kind of embarrassing how excited that I get to hear the nominees, especially considering I’m not in contention for any of them. Sadly, best movie goer is yet to be a category. At this point, I probably get more excited for the nominations than Meryl Streep does; at this point it’s probably old hat to her.

I usually have a pretty good idea of what is going to be nominated – I read enough about movies to have a general idea which films have Academy buzz surrounding them and which don’t – so I’m usually not terribly surprised by who gets the nod. I may not agree, but there is rarely anything shocking. This year, however, my mouth actually dropped open when I was reading the list of nominees for best animated feature. If there was ever a movie that I thought was a lock to get a nomination – and probably win – this category, it was The LEGO Movie. It was one of my favorite movies of last year and it managed to charm almost all the kids and adults that I know. And yet, when the nominees were announced, The LEGO Movie was conspicuously absent. It received a nomination for best original song, but no love in the animated film category. This was a huge snub.

I was not alone in my surprise; seconds after the names of the nominees were read, Twitter exploded with shock over The LEGO Movie’s omission. Apparently I am not the only person who is far too invested in the Oscars. We’ll never know for sure why The LEGO Movie didn’t connect enough with voters to get at least a nomination – perhaps the commercialism underlying the movie turned them off or the live-action sequences were held against the film – but I’ll be curious to hear the other theories as to what happened. I will say though, it’s a nice change of pace to be outraged by something so frivolous. The last few months have had a lot for people to get upset about and if The LEGO Movie being ignored is what the people of Twitter are riled up about, that means that we’re getting a break from the other awfulness of the world.

As usual, this year I will valiantly try to complete my Oscar death race by seeing every single film that was nominated. We’re talking every film – not just the big categories. I give just as much attention to the nominees for best sound mixing as I do for best picture. I’m in decent shape this year; I’d seen a fair number of these films and performance before today and I had a good idea of what I had left to do. As always, it’s the Best Documentary (long feature and short feature) and Best Foreign Film that prove to be the most difficult to track down. The closest I’ve ever come to finishing the Oscar death race was two years ago when I was missing only two foreign films and the documentary shorts. I’m not sure how close I’ll come this year, but at least I now know what films I have to try and track down. That’s half the battle.

Here is the full list of the 2015 Oscar nominees; the movie in bold I have seen, in case you want to chart my progress.

Daisy Jacobs and Christopher Hees, The Bigger Picture (National Film and Television School) Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi, The Dam Keeper (Tonko House)Patrick Osborne and Kristina Reed, Feast (Walt Disney Animation Studios)Torill Kove, Me and My Moulton (Mikrofilm in co-production with the National Film Board of Canada) Joris Oprins, A Single Life (Job, Joris & Marieke)